Caeli Smith, Founder and Director

Curiosity and enthusiasm shape MusicAlly founder Caeli Smith’s personality and teaching style. By guiding students to trust their talents, she helps develop creative problem solvers, flexible collaborators, and hungry learners. She has an excellent appreciation for silliness and joy, whether working with 3 year old beginners, undergraduate and graduate students at Juilliard, or 75 year old amateur musicians.

Caeli teaches technique classes at Juilliard as an adjunct professor. She is on the violin, viola, and chamber music faculty for the Heifetz Institute’s Program for the Exceptionally Gifted. Her students have been accepted to Oberlin, Peabody, the New England Conservatory, the National Youth Orchestra, and Tanglewood’s BUTI.

Grounded in accessible metaphor and resisting rote explanation, Caeli begins with whatever her students are curious about, and uses that curiosity as an engine for discovery of technique and artistic interpretation. She focuses on freedom from the sheet music, ease in technique, and self-confidence. Throughout her experience teaching private and group lessons, chamber ensembles, and aesthetic music education in the classroom, her students enjoy exploring the works of composers including Bach, Piazzolla, Bruch, Mark O’Connor, and Hindemith.

Caeli has performed as a concerto soloist with the Juilliard Orchestra on stage at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. Her work as a chamber musician has brought her to perform alongside Jordi Savall at the Philharmonie de Paris; as part of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra on tour in Spain and Germany; and with Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect. Caeli received her bachelor’s and master’s of music from The Juilliard School, where she received with the William Schuman prize for Outstanding Achievement and Leadership in Music.

Interactive performance is a favorite process for Caeli, as she loves opening up the conventional concert experience to cultivate social and creative exchange between performer and audience. As a New York Philharmonic teaching artist and an Ensemble Connect fellow, she helps listeners step inside the shoes of the composer and tinker with the factors that make an effective piece of music. She has presented interactive shows at the Rose Studio at Lincoln Center; for elementary school students in Paris; and in New York City detention centers.

As the founder of MusicAlly, Caeli matches young instrumentalists without financial resources with quality private instruction and instruments. Her Title 1 elementary school classrooms in NYC have prepared and presented performances of original recorder compositions; arrangements of Maroon 5 songs for 5th grade graduation; and a video project depicting ocean scenes using body percussion, vocals, and recorders.